*** AMD "Zen 4" thread (inc AM5/APU discussion) ***

[HACO]

You can never achieve 100% IPC increase, it's much easier to add cores and scale on it depending on your scaling performance.

Also, the modern CPU cores are so small, that it is virtually impossible to offer only 1 core.
Except if you want your core to be 150 sq mm which is insane.

Of course you can achieve 100% IPC increases, just not in one generation (although we've seen 40% in one generation in recent years).

In desktop, we've had 100% IPC improvement in the last 10 years. In mobile, we had 100% IPC increases every 3-4 years. Not only we will have 100% IPC increases, but we'll have 100s upon 100s % of IPC gains as we progress in future decades. Adding cores is also not as easy as it seems, the more you add the more you limit your power/thermals, you add latency, you decrease cache performance, and more, therefore limiting single threaded performance, and multicore performance scaling isn't linear for most tasks, especially in consumer workloads. There's a reason you don't have a 128-core CPU in your laptop or desktop. Adding cores should always be a last resort in pursuit of more performance, if you can use the same die space and thermal/power envelope to make bigger, faster cores, you should do that.

I also wasn't arguing that they would or should release single-core consumer CPUs, only that number of cores is not a good indicator for performance because there is a huge variety in IPC among CPUs in the market right now. You can easily have CPUs with fewer cores that are faster than those with more cores, at both single-threaded and multi-threaded applications.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

Whilst that may be true, still doesnt mean that a skylake dual core isnt hot trash for todays standards.

quad cores with SMT should be the bare minimum imo. Same goes for the 4gb vs 8gb ram argument.

Id still take dual core coffee lake with 4gb ram over 8 core bulldozer with 8gb ram

 

[HACO]

Yeah I understand that, but I mean more so in just terms of how much more you generally do on a laptop/pc these days and how programs are becoming beefier and require more power.

I don't disagree for power users or prosumers, but I still think vast majority of people will be fine with a dual-core laptop if the cores are Zen 3 for example. That is actually a better than these Pentium quad cores that are in a lot of laptops these days.

 

[4K8KW10]

Id still take dual core coffee lake with 4gb ram over 8 core bulldozer with 8gb ram

The dual-core will be as slow as snail, the Bulldozer will feel more responsive.

Windows and apps are built to perform better on multi-threaded systems.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

Not true as such. Iv done back to back usage with multipe slow cores vs lesser cores which are much more modern and faster. Overall the lower core machine was quicker especially in stuff like loading web pages

 

[4K8KW10]

Not true as such. Iv done back to back usage with multipe slow cores vs lesser cores which are much more modern and faster. Overall the lower core machine was quicker especially in stuff like loading web pages

Oh, true, true,

I have 6 tabs running right now and the RAM usage is 4.8GB, with 4GB and a dual core CPU you will be dead in the water.

 

[HACO]

The dual-core will be as slow as snail, the Bulldozer will feel more responsive.

Windows and apps are built to perform better on multi-threaded systems.

A dual-core coffee lake would be much much faster than a bulldozer at single threaded tasks (like web browsing), and maybe only 20-25% slower at heavily multithreaded tasks. Since you mentioned responsiveness, that's almost entirely a function of single-threaded performance.

In terms of daily usage, the dual-core coffee lake provides a much better experience.

Oh, true, true,

I have 6 tabs running right now and the RAM usage is 4.8GB, with 4GB and a dual core CPU you will be dead in the water.

Browsing is single-threaded. 1, 2 or 64 cores will be the same, what's important is how fast that core is.

 

[4K8KW10]

A dual-core coffee lake would be much much faster than a bulldozer at single threaded tasks (like web browsing), and maybe only 20-25% slower at heavily multithreaded tasks. Since you mentioned responsiveness, that's almost entirely a function of single-threaded performance.

In terms of daily usage, the dual-core coffee lake provides a much better experience.



Browsing is single-threaded. 1, 2 or 64 cores will be the same, what's important is how fast that core is.

Have you have used a browser with a dual-core?

Web browsing is heavily multi-threaded.

It's easy to sit on the 16-thread Ryzen 7 5800X and discuss without knowing what the dual-core APUs can

 

[HACO]

Have you have used a browser with a dual-core?

Web browsing is heavily multi-threaded.

It's easy to sit on the 16-thread Ryzen 7 5800X and discuss without knowing what the dual-core APUs can

Dude, I don't want to be rude, but you have no idea what you're talking about. This is embarrassing. Just read up a little on Javascript and how browsers actually work.

I know you're the guy who claimed x86 CPUs can't turn off their transistors, so absurd claims are not new territory for you, but sometimes it's best to just step away from the keyboard.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

iv been doing web browsing on single core pentium 3's (wasnt much web to browse on my 486 days lol). had various systems over the years even a 6 core thuban amd which a family member still uses and its much slower in web browsing than a modern dual core.
if all you do is cinebench then yea results can be different.

 

[4K8KW10]

Dude, I don't want to be rude, but you have no idea what you're talking about. This is embarrassing. Just read up a little on Javascript and how browsers actually work.

I know you're the guy who claimed x86 CPUs can't turn off their transistors, so absurd claims are not new territory for you, but sometimes it's best to just step away from the keyboard.

No.

"Chrome has a multi-process architecture and each process is heavily multi-threaded. The main goal is to keep the main thread (“UI” thread in the browser process) and IO thread (each process' thread for handling IPC) responsive. This means offloading any blocking I/O or other expensive operations to other threads."
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-web-browsers-use-processes-and-threads-9f8f8fa23371

 

[Deleted member 209350]

I don't disagree for power users or prosumers, but I still think vast majority of people will be fine with a dual-core laptop if the cores are Zen 3 for example. That is actually a better than these Pentium quad cores that are in a lot of laptops these days.

Well if its literally just going to be for web browsing 99% of the time, then yeah a dual core should be fine i guess haha.

AMD looks like they are already kind of lowering and stopping their chips that are below a quad core, it looks like its their new baseline

 

[HACO]

No.

"Chrome has a multi-process architecture and each process is heavily multi-threaded. The main goal is to keep the main thread (“UI” thread in the browser process) and IO thread (each process' thread for handling IPC) responsive. This means offloading any blocking I/O or other expensive operations to other threads."
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-web-browsers-use-processes-and-threads-9f8f8fa23371

Good job Googling "browser thread" and copy/pasting the first link without even understanding it. Separating UI thread from computation threads doesn't make a task heavily multithreaded. You need to dig into the actual workload that happen during web browsing (e.g. Javascript rendering) to see if they're multithreaded or not. You can find this out by performance profiling a certain task (you can do this in any browser). Or you can just read up a little on these things.

Feel free to look up web browsing benchmarks as well, and see how they scale with cores. Spoiler: they don't.

Example: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1621...-review-5950x-5900x-5800x-and-5700x-tested/16

And: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2020/2779

See top ones? 15w 4-core i7-1185G7 beating 10-core i9-10900K or 64-core Threadripper 3990X by a big margin?

Spoiler: Anandtech benchmarks

Now go and look up the same charts for, let's say, 7-zip compression to see how that 4-core laptop CPU compares with the 64-core Threadripper. Only then you will understand what heavy multithreading is.

And finally FYI, when people say a certain task is single-threaded, they don't mean there is literally one single thread. It means the bulk of the computation is in a single thread (the Javascript thread in the case of browsers), and performance doesn't scale by just throwing more threads at it.

 

[muziqaz]

First things first: everyone has different definition of "Working fine".
Even Zen 3 Dual core would not be fine browsing. Yes, majority of people will think that this kind of performance is acceptable, but in reality it will not be. Only people who actually experience what modern CPU can do, will see that dual core might struggle with simple every day tasks. While chrome itself might be light threaded, the content it displays if far from light. It's very easy to wonder into badly coded website, especially without adblock plus, and you end up with a nightmare of an experience.

 

[philo-sofa]

For what it's worth my observation is that a given tab is typically single threaded, but different tabs tend to be allocated to different cores.

 

[muziqaz]

I remember the narrative few years back before Ryzen: It is very difficult to improve IPC these days.
Now look at this:
Intel improved 19% all of the sudden when Ryzen popped up
AMD keeps bringing double digit improvements, and rumours are not showing any sign of slowdown.
So when there is no competition, it is very difficult to improve IPC, but when your arse is being kicked left and right, everything is possible

 

[muziqaz]

For what it's worth my observation is that a given tab is typically single threaded, but different tabs tend to be allocated to different cores.

That was my experience as well. I used to come across a website with loads of photos, and chrome would start to stutter even on 2700x, with single thread being pegged at 100%

 

[HACO]

First things first: everyone has different definition of "Working fine".
Even Zen 3 Dual core would not be fine browsing. Yes, majority of people will think that this kind of performance is acceptable, but in reality it will not be. Only people who actually experience what modern CPU can do, will see that dual core might struggle with simple every day tasks. While chrome itself might be light threaded, the content it displays if far from light. It's very easy to wonder into badly coded website, especially without adblock plus, and you end up with a nightmare of an experience.

It's actually the Javascript content that runs in a single-threaded engine. Extensions (like ABP) are also single-threaded, btw.

For what it's worth my observation is that a given tab is typically single threaded, but different tabs tend to be allocated to different cores.

Each tab is a different process with its own threads, which are allocated to different cores by the OS. There's very little process going on when you don't interact with the tab, and people don't interact with 10s of tabs at the same time for this to be relevant. The benchmarks do consider all of these and you can look up the results.

Ram is far more important for running many tabs, to ensure that everything remains in-memory and snappy and isn't cached to disk.

I remember the narrative few years back before Ryzen: It is very difficult to improve IPC these days.
Now look at this:
Intel improved 19% all of the sudden when Ryzen popped up
AMD keeps bringing double digit improvements, and rumours are not showing any sign of slowdown.
So when there is no competition, it is very difficult to improve IPC, but when your arse is being kicked left and right, everything is possible

Exactly. Intel wanted us to believe IPS improvement is difficult, what's actually the case is that IPC improvement is expensive, rather than difficult. You'd need more R&D and bigger cores and serious microarchitecture changes which eat into your margins. So Intel didn't do it when they had no competition. Now the landscape has changed, Apple and AMD have significantly pushed ahead in terms of IPC to surpass Intel and Intel has no choice but to go back to doing the difficult thing.

 

[4K8KW10]

Facebook is heavy, I remember with my old Core 2 Duo T6600 it was simply impossible to run it without waiting half a minute to load a single video - Facebook has many of them and when you scroll, you see how fast your CPU actually is.

2-core CPUs are terrible no matter the IPC.

 

[4K8KW10]

"The company didn't confirm exactly when Zen 4 will be released, but sometime in 2022 looks the most likely. That would follow AMD's usual update cycle for its CPU architecture:

• Zen - March 2017
• Zen 2 - August 2019
• Zen 3 - November 2020

If AMD were to follow this sort of schedule, Zen 4 would arrive sometime between February and April 2022. That's just speculation at this stage, though - there's been no concrete rumours to back up a more specific release date.

Despite being so far ahead of its expected release, we already have a few concrete rumours on what to expect from Zen 4.

The first one isn't a rumour at all - AMD itself has confirmed that it will move to a 5nm process, down from the current 7nm you'll find on Zen 3. This could be a significant move, with the ability to provide the same amount of power within a smaller footprint.

A subsequent post on tech blog Chips and Cheese suggests this could be as much as 40%, while IPC (instructions per clock) could increase by 25%. The article goes on to say that early samples of AMD's less EPYC processors show a 29% speed improvement over the current generation, despite having the same number of cores and clocks."

https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/news/pc-components/amd-zen-4-3801795/